He was at the door, standing. The Indians, rocking silently, did nothing to stop him when he reached down and grabbed one of their machetes. In every way the noise in the street was worse.

“Isn’t anyone going to do anything?”

The Marine looked up from the table like Ethan hadn’t heard him properly, like, as usual, he couldn’t quite make himself understood. “I told you coyotes don’t live this far south,” he mumbled. “Maybe it’s a flock of owls. It doesn’t fucking matter. The town’s on lockdown. They think it’s the goddamn Duende.”

WHEN ETHAN FOUND THEM, three small and mangy coyotes, about fifty yards up the hill in a burnt-out clearing, they stopped and turned and faced him. The child on the ground was quieter, but still moaning and still moving. Beyond the clearing, a bamboo grove cluttered back into the mountain forest. If that’s where the coyotes came from there could be more in there. Across the road, a few scrap huts stood crookedly on the sloping plain, but they stayed quiet and lightless and no one came out to help.

Ethan began to shout and wave and the coyotes stopped their attack and watched him, but did not move. He jumped, he shouted, and one of the coyotes jolted into motion and bit the girl on the ground. Then another one did and as the third one loped in toward her, Ethan started to run at them—swinging the machete, bellowing—and they bolted. They scrambled off, not like dogs, but faster, jerking away with the skittering motion of insects until they reached the bamboo canebreak where again they stopped and turned and stood waiting. He only had a few moments. For now, the coyotes were disturbed, but they wouldn’t be for long.

The girl on the ground looked about seven or eight, big prey for such trashy coyotes, and she must have fought for a while—that was what he heard in the bar—but now she lay curled with her legs tucked against her chest, panting her way into shock. Standing in a wide flank at the canebreak, the coyotes watched curiously as Ethan dropped the machete and lifted the girl into his arms. He began to walk with her and the coyotes didn’t follow. He asked her name and she wouldn’t tell him, but he kept asking her. She was bleeding from her hands and arms, one of her legs, and a fleshy, tangled mess where her right ear was shredded. Slowly, people began to emerge from the huts. Somewhere behind him a woman cried out and he stood there in the street with the girl and waited.